


The Queen, in Exile

by scribblemyname



Category: Captain America (Movies), Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Crossover, Developing Relationship, F/M, First Meeting, Post-Canon, Realm Hopping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-13 23:33:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4541709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblemyname/pseuds/scribblemyname
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky isn't the only one who's lost everything. He was born in 1917. She was queen in another world. Susan is someone he never expected to find.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Queen, in Exile

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aurilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/gifts).



> _Captain America: The Civil War_ will doubtless diverge from this potential timeline for Bucky. For the sake of this story, I ignored it.
> 
> Many thanks for a glorious beta job by a wonderful nonnie. All remaining mistakes are my own.

She took the rings when she claimed her family. She wore gloves and carefully packed them away between folds of cloth.

They liked to think she'd forgotten how to handle these things, maybe even what they were, rather than realizing she'd turned away—just as _he_ had asked her to.

The rings were her backup plan. They stayed carefully wrapped in a small case she kept for them.

_"There were many chinks or chasms between worlds in old times, but they have grown rarer. This was one of the last: I do not say the last."_

Susan had never stopped believing Aslan or his words. She believed these other chasms existed, and she would find them.

* * *

Time ran different from world to world, one door led to another, and when one door was used, it often closed—permanently. She didn't really care if her own world became lost to her.

And _he_ was there in all of them, Aslan, by different names. She knew the sensation that ran over her whenever someone spoke his name and learned the different ways he was called.

"The Lord of the North is coming," they said in hushed whispers.

She shivered with knowledge of that sound in another's voice and who it meant.

* * *

He was human here, or something like it. When he came, the people of his land looked upon him with awe and love, but she had no room in her heart for surprise when he turned to her and she recognized the look in his eyes. He had looked upon her like that before, after the chasm on the way to Aslan's How and at other times when her failures became most stinging.

"Susan." There was such tender love and sorrow in his voice.

She knelt with a graciousness that belonged to Narnia.

"Return home, my daughter."

She had obeyed him the first time he gave that command. She obeyed again.

* * *

"What's your favorite thing about England that you miss?" Sam asked.

Sometimes the guys at the Tower got talking about things, like previous places they were deployed, like what pieces of them got left behind out there. Sometimes they talked about the nice parts of those memories, like the guys who had your back, like the ones you'd give up anything for, and like the upsides of the places they stayed.

"The pubs," Bucky answered promptly. "They made the best beer."

Clint and Natasha had been chatting softly as they headed in the direction of the door together when Clint promptly stopped and interjected. "There's a good pub not too far from here." He rattled off the directions while Bucky stared at him.

Natasha smiled. "Clint's always finding the best little places."

Clint grinned at her and slung an arm over her shoulder to head out.

"Stealing my thunder," Sam muttered.

Bucky watched the pair leave. He used to do that a lot to Steve when he was actually taller than him. There was something almost miraculous about Steve being in this modern age with him, but there was something terrible about it too.

"Think I might try that," he said half to himself, half to Sam.

* * *

The pub was a nice little place, hole in the wall, family-owned. There was dancing on one side, tables for eating on the other, and a bar at the front. He took to the bar and ordered a pint of their best.

It was fun going clubbing with Steve, doing most things with him, but sometimes Bucky needed some space to deal with everyone. Every time he came back to himself, everything important had changed, and Steve seemed like the biggest change of all.

"Are you all right?" a soft, feminine voice inquired beside him at the bar in a familiar British accent.

It reminded him of Peggy and ached just a bit where it settled into the haunts of his memory. She was a beautiful woman, the kind he'd once flirted with easily.

He shot her a small grin, but answered honestly enough. "Everything's gone, you know. Everyone I used to know, the old places, old memories. The world's gone while I was away, and there's only one guy left who understands."

Bucky wasn't entirely certain what he expected. Perhaps a polite condolence and then her to move on, possibly move away and finish her own food.

Instead, she put on the other polite look, the one covering annoyance rather than indifference. "Don't be so self-absorbed as to think you're the only one who's lost everything."

It startled him. He wondered briefly if she truly had any idea of what he'd meant. "What's your name?"

* * *

Susan hadn't really intended to interrupt his meeting with a good pint of beer, especially when he seemed to want to forget whatever troubled him for a little while, and she certainly hadn't meant to take what troubled him personally. Well, it wasn't that so much as the implication that no one else could understand it.

"What's your name?" he asked, giving her a second, more thorough look than the passing glance at her polite concern.

What should have come out was Pevensie. What did come out was "Susan," and she had to clamp her lips shut over the "High Queen" that wanted to follow. She wondered sometimes if her brothers and sister ever realized what it was like to wear the same title as Jadis. She'd become the Gentle to save herself.

"I'm sorry," she added at the end. She hadn't meant to snap at him like he was her own sibling. "I must be a boorish drinking companion."

"No, I'm intrigued." His dimpled grin flashed out again, and it had been a while since she'd felt that small flare of attraction, but it was there. "I was born in 1917." He cocked his head and waited, as if daring her to disbelieve him.

Susan looked at him for a long moment, the classic good looks from an era she'd once belonged to, the gleam of silver beneath the cuff of his left sleeve. "I was once a queen," she said with all the regality she'd once possessed in Narnia. She did not disbelieve him.

"You're not anymore?" he asked, curiously.

"Once a queen, always a queen." She left space for the words she did not say. "But not here. Not in England, and not in America."

She flushed as she realized how much she had said and after denying it for so many years. "I'm sorry. I should be going." She placed her money on the counter.

"Will you come back?" His voice caught her a moment before she could escape.

"I should go."

* * *

Susan.

He had no last name for her and he wasn't a stalker, but it niggled at him that there would be a queen and he didn't know of royalty by that name. Of course, he also lived in a world changed by demigods and myth come to life.

"Thor, may I ask you something?" he broached the topic later when no one else was around and Thor had not yet left the Tower after a debrief.

Thor looked somewhat surprised but quickly moved to polite helpfulness. "Of course." He followed Bucky to the side of the room.

They hadn't talked much and Bucky hadn't yet moved much further than growing reacquainted with himself, with Steve, and with their new friendship. He interacted with the other Avengers and members of Stark Industries or the new SHIELD as necessary and mostly for professional reasons. This was different.

"Have you known any realms with a queen named Susan?"

Thor's eyebrows furrowed in thought. "I have not. There are others I could ask."

Heimdall, no doubt, who saw all throughout the worlds of Yggdrasil or even some librarian of the records kept by Asgard of their own dealings with other races.

Bucky shook his head. "That's all right. Thanks."

* * *

He stopped by the pub frequently, became a regular. He kept his eyes open for her and tried to tell himself he wasn't disappointed when she didn't show up.

* * *

She waited three months. No one should wait that long for a crazy woman. But he did, he was there, and he had waited.

She avoided him at first and ordered at one of the tables at the edge of the room, ignoring the way he glanced over at her from the bar from time to time.

There was music tonight, earthly music she had never especially missed. She missed the high flutes and sweet pipes and horns of Narnian music, though she'd been known to dance endlessly to the classics playing now. She'd once been blamed for that, dancing and flirting as if there were nothing better to do with her youth and her age and the beauty she'd been known for even in Narnia. And they hadn't been wrong. It was the first way she'd used to help herself forget, little better than those drinking away their sorrows here.

Susan ate her meal, sipped her beer, and listened to the music until something of the world she'd once known sank a little deeper into her bones and she thought maybe she could be a little less the Stranger of the Far Mountains and the Wanderer from Beyond the Seas and more Susan Pevensie of England. In America, but that couldn't be helped. It was easier to lose herself in a new world without returning to a homeland that no longer remembered her.

He had a good sense of when she had settled into the feeling—the music, the pub—and she wasn't sure whether to be surprised or not that he finally came over and asked her to dance.

"You come here regularly?" she asked him.

He flashed her that charming smile again and offered, "I do now."

She hesitated only a moment. What could it hurt? She took his hand and let him lead her out onto the floor.

"You dance well, your majesty."

"Do not mock me," she snapped coldly.

"I wasn't." He spun her around and brought her back in close. "I've known royalty. I knew a woman who was once a princess."

He seemed quite serious and perhaps he had. Perhaps he once guarded royalty or destroyed them. Susan had been courted by many warriors and those less skilled in war but of noble blood. She knew one when she met one. Perhaps somehow he was the same.

"What _is_ your name?" It had taken her long enough to ask.

"Bucky Barnes." He studied the expression on her face, as if thinking she would recognize it.

She didn't. She merely hummed acknowledgement and let her feet move out in the dances she well remembered. She had always been an excellent dancer and he was a good partner.

"Tell me something about when you were queen," he said softly.

Something of her old courtly manners returned to her, and it was with an arch tone that she told him, "I think I shall remain mysterious for now."

* * *

She had always been attracted to a proper warrior in bed, and he was the kind of man she'd never expected to meet in this world. She didn't ask about his metal arm or the occasional clicks of technology she could hear beneath the plating, but she liked the sensation of cool hard metal on her skin as he worked quickly and gracefully at divesting her of her clothes.

"How do you know?" Bucky asked, all amused scoffing. "Have you met any proper warriors?"

"I am one, sir," she replied, "which you shall kindly remember."

She flushed hotly at his lazy grin.

He leaned in and kissed her fiercely. "Yes, ma'am."

Susan wasn't known for being a warrior, not on earth and not in other lands, but she had seen battle and looked it pale and bravely in its face, let her bowstring twang and sent death flying to its mark. The gift of Father Christmas did not easily miss. Nor did she.

She let him kiss her, let him waken the fire underneath her skin where it had lain hidden for long enough as she traveled through worlds not earth and not Narnia, lands with strange names and customs and their own clocks never moving in sync with one another. She had loved men once, been loved by them, even before she was done being a child, and this was a pleasant diversion with someone who did seem to understand a bit of what it was to be displaced so thoroughly.

She let him touch her and touched him back, let any questions sink away with whether he used rings or apples from the tree of life to skip through time or live through it. Susan had learned a long time ago that she didn't really want to know.

* * *

"You're gentle for a warrior," he murmured afterward when they still lay tangled together.

She sat up and pulled away from him, and he found himself sitting up with her reflexively, worried at how he had driven her away.

"Don't call me that," she said quiet in the dark beside him. She slipped out of the bed.

"You don't have to go," he said back, not sure why it was so important that she stay. Something flickered in his memory of Peggy and Steve and learning what it felt to be invisible.

Susan shook out her long, black hair and fished her clothes out of the stack she'd left them in. "I should."

She'd said that before. She'd come back that time.

* * *

"You all right?" Sam asked when he saw Bucky in the morning.

Bucky shrugged off the feeling, tossed off one of his more charming smiles, and said, "Sure. Where's this Avengers meeting Steve called?"

He followed Sam into the conference room and shot the breeze easily enough until they'd all gathered. It was easier than saying he'd met an improbable woman who he doubted he'd see again.

It was almost strange how much pain and torture waited behind the thin front of his current memory, but it was the rejection he'd rarely felt that left him floundering. This was his world he lived in, and he still felt like he lived outside of it.

Of course, being frozen for half of your life could do that to you.

* * *

If she were willing to be found, he figured in the end that she would show up at the pub again, so he went there several evenings a week, as he'd settled into the first time he'd been hoping to meet her again, and waited.

* * *

Susan had done all the things she assumed she should: procured ID, got a job, and settled into life on earth for the time being, even if it were a few decades into her own future. Narnia had been the sort of experience that gained her lifetimes while always resetting her back to normal. Other worlds though, traveling through the chinks instead of the wood between the worlds or Aslan's call, landed her in the modern age with no way of turning the clock backward. What few relatives of hers had survived were gone.

She wondered sometimes why it was Aslan wanted her to come back here when there was nothing waiting for her.

She found herself looking up the name "Bucky Barnes" in the library, reading through the history of the Howling Commandos, then showing up at a small pub that had always been neatly placed between her work and her cramped but comfortable apartment. It had been a long time since she'd known someone quite as out of time as she was.

"Barnes, isn't it?" she said softly as she sat up on the stool beside him.

His mouth curled upward in a smile.

* * *

They both loved dancing, and she liked his stories of Steve, the "one guy left" who understood, and who didn't like to see other people get hurt. It was one of her strongest traits to dislike the occasional necessity of hurting others.

"I can agree with him."

"So you'd go toe to toe with a guy in an alley three times bigger than you?"

She grimaced but agreed. "Something would have to be done." She shrugged. "I rarely miss."

Even here, in America, in England. She'd kept up the skill when she came back and learned that Narnia was lost to her. She hadn't had the advantage of Narnian air or a bow that did not easily miss, but she had discipline and decades of experience.

Bucky got that look in his eye like he wanted to whisk her away for them to go practice shots against each other, but he resisted whatever idea passed through his head and asked her out properly. "I'd like to keep seeing you."

She wasn't sure what it was about him except that genuine smile and the way he sincerely sought to please her and put her at ease. Well, that was it. She hadn't been properly courted in years, and courtship seemed something of a lost skill in the time she had landed in.

"It would please us to entertain your suit," Susan answered offhand, not even realizing she'd dropped back into her old formal ways of speaking until he shot her an odd look. She held her ground and refused to blush.

"All right then." He let it pass unmentioned.

* * *

"So you're stepping out with someone?" Steve asked, an uncertain smile waiting behind his eyes.

Bucky rubbed off the last of the shaving cream he'd gotten on his neck. "Yeah. You'd like her."

He would bring her by too, if all continued to go well.

* * *

They were walking together when they passed the train station and Bucky stared for a long moment before saying, "Let's go another way."

Susan stared at him. "You too?" she asked.

He looked at her sharply for a long moment.

Her hand had been tucked neatly on his arm. She tugged gently and they switched directions.

"What happened?" he asked after enough silence had passed.

"My family," she answered tightly. Another long moment went by before she returned the question in a strained voice, as if it had been dragged out of her, "You?"

He glanced back over his shoulder and restrained a shudder. "I fell."

It didn’t explain anything, but for one who had also dropped through worlds, it explained everything.

* * *

He was in her house waiting for her to finish all the last minute touches to get ready to go when she heard him ask, "What's this?" as he reached out metal fingers toward the case she hadn't realized she'd left open on the bureau.

"Don't touch those," she ordered, a little sharper than she'd intended.

Bucky stilled instantly, then dragged his questioning gaze from rings to her face.

She moved in quickly but not brusquely to close up the case and put it away. She felt cold metal gently touch her face and took in a breath. This wasn't something she was ready to talk about. Then again, Bucky hadn't really told her how he ended up with that arm either.

She settled her hand into his and looked at him as she brought it to her mouth and kissed him softly. She never knew how much of the gesture he actually felt through the prosthetic, but she knew it affected him in some way.

His grip tightened on hers. "They're not rings, are they?" he said, his tone such that she suspected he didn't expect an answer.

Susan shrugged and pulled away. "They are rings," she said, faintly apologetic for leaving it at that.

* * *

It was in the little mysteries between them that they found common ground, the little things they remembered as they laughed together over meals and outings and exchanged actual war stories. Susan kept hers initially to her experiences in the countryside while it was fought, but she was too knowing when it came to what happened in the trenches of battle.

"Where were you queen?" Bucky asked, somewhere between the last food and their cups of coffee.

"I don't speak of that," she answered, clipped. It was a final sort of answer, and she made it stick when she began to gather up the detritus of her meal to throw away and shut her mouth in a stubborn line.

Bucky sighed and requested the check.

* * *

Susan was stubborn, but so was Bucky, having had plenty of experience beating his head against the immovable rock of Steve's obstinance. He asked again later, when she was still hovering atop him, a hitch in her breath from the aftermath of her climax, his hands firm on the softness of her hips.

"Why don't you talk about it?"

"Oh, bother it, Bucky." She pulled away with that snappish displeasure she got whenever someone pressed a point she'd rather they drop. "There's no point."

"Just like there's no point in me remembering my past," he threw back at her, knowing it would at least get a reaction.

She stared at him a moment, then shook her head. "Because I can never go back. Because its rolling hills and high meadows are forever lost to me. Because I will never again attend the festivals or the great dances. Because my brothers and sister are all dead and gone from the last time they tried to take a train back."

It was more than he'd expected her to give, more than _Susan_ had expected to give, judging from the way she pressed her mouth shut after and a hand over it.

He wanted to wipe away that flash of pain in her eyes. He couldn't. He knew that, but… "I was… They took my mind and my arm… I lost that when I fell. They replaced it with this to make me a killer." Bucky clenched the metal fingers. "Most people would never believe it."

Susan followed the motion with her gaze. "I am queen over Narnia," she told him, voice softening a little. "Not was. Am. Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen in Narnia."

He gently reached out and brushed his hand over her cheek. "The queen, in exile."

She stared at him, eyes glistening with unshed tears. "They called me the Gentle. My little sister, the Valiant." Her composure crumpled. "For shame, Bucky, do not torment my heart with these things!"

He drew her into his arms, gently soothing, and let her cry against him.

* * *

He was the one who got to hold her as she found who she was buried in the pieces of who she had become. He kissed her, he made love to her, and she was surprisingly fierce and knowing in the way she was with him.

"I've lived twice," she told him. "Three times. More." She shrugged as she stared at the ceiling above his bed. "There _are_ places I can still go back."

Just not Narnia.

* * *

Sometimes he had nightmares, waking abruptly beside her and dragging her out of sleep to see whether he would return to it. Sometimes insomnia had him standing at the window like Edmund pondering his own treacheries. There was something different in him at those times. He had the bearing of the soldier he once was. She rose from the bed, placed a hand on his neck, and stood with him.

"They wanted to call me High Queen once, as the elder," she murmured into the darkness.

Bucky looked at her then, those beautiful eyes dark and flickering with interest.

"Jadis was called that. She took my brother and made him a traitor." There was so much she could say about Edmund, the Just, her brother who had always been so strong and protective afterward.

She closed her eyes against the feeling of Bucky's metal hand cradling her cheek. "You're not like anyone else," he said, voice wrapping around her like a soft breath.

She opened her eyes. "I'm not," she agreed. "Neither are you."

* * *

"If you had to," Susan asked once, after secrets had slowly developed simply into their shared world, "would you cross all the realms and all the lands and all the seas to find me?"

She looked at him as she asked, her fingers wound tight through his, her dark hair spread over the grass under the blue summer sky.

Bucky turned to her curiously. "Would you for me?"

She smiled softly, more to herself than at him. "I did."

She rolled over and leaned against him. "Come with me," she asked, eyes bright and clear. "Cross all the realms and all the lands and all the seas with me."

He caught his hand in her hair and answered, "Don't you dare go without me."


End file.
